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Cultural Spillovers: Copyright, Conceptions of Authors, and Commercial Practices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Heather A. Haveman Open the ORCID record for Heather A. Haveman [Opens in a new window]  and
Daniel N. Kluttz Open the ORCID record for Daniel N. Kluttz [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Economists, sociologists, and legal scholars agree that intellectual-property law is fundamental to markets because legal control over copying motivates creative production. But in many markets, such as fashion and databases, there is little or no intellectual-property protection, yet producers still create innovative products and earn profits. Research on such “negative spaces” in intellectual-property law reveals that social norms can constrain copying and support creative production. This insight guided our analysis of markets for American literature before the Civil War, in both magazines (a negative space, where intellectual-property law did not apply) and books (a positive space, where intellectual-property law did apply). We observed similar understandings of authors and similar commercial practices in both spaces because many authors published the same work in both spaces. Based on these observations, we propose that cultural elements that develop in positive spaces may spill over to related negative spaces, inducing changes in buyers' and sellers' behavior in negative spaces. Our historical approach also revealed nuances—shades of gray—beyond the sharp distinction typically drawn between negative and positive spaces. In the 1850s, a few large-circulation magazine publishers began to claim copyright, but many still allowed reprinting and none litigated to protect copyright.

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Law & Society Review , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 7 - 40
Copyright
© 2017 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This research was funded by grants from the NSF (SES-0727502 and SES-0096016), the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and Berkeley's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. For helpful comments, we thank the editors, four anonymous reviewers, William Gallagher, Simon Stern, and seminar participants at Berkeley's Center for the Study of Law and Society and Center for Culture, Organizations, and Politics.

This article was published online on 29 November 2017. An error was subsequently identified. This notice is included in the online and print versions to indicate that both have been corrected on 14 December 2017.

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